Nonplanar Shocks and Solitons in a Strongly Coupled Adiabatic Plasma: the Roles of Heavy Ion Dynamics and Nonextensitivity

An investigation has been made on heavy ion-acoustic (HIA) nonplanar shocks and solitons in an unmagnetized, collisionless, strongly coupled plasma whose constituents are strongly correlated adiabatic inertial heavy ions, weakly correlated nonextensive distributed electrons and Maxwellian light ions. By using appropriate nonlinear equations for our strongly coupled plasma system and the well-known reductive perturbation technique, a modified Burgers (mB) equation and a modified Korteweg-de Vries (mK-dV) equation have been derived. They are also numerically solved in order to investigate the basic features (viz. polarity, amplitude, width, etc.) of cylindrical and spherical shock/solitary waves in such a strongly coupled plasma system. The roles of heavy ion dynamics, nonextensivity of electrons, and other plasma parameters arised in this investigation have significantly modified the basic features of the cylindrical and spherical HIA solitary and shock waves. The findings of our results obtained from this theoretical investigation may be useful in understanding the nonlinear phenomena associated with the cylindrical and spherical HIA waves both in space and laboratory plasmas. (C) 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim